Peter Kent says motorists could save $900 from Obama’s fuel standards

OTTAWA — Canadian motorists could reduce gasoline consumption by 50 per cent and save about $900 per year by 2025 through new fuel economy standards introduced by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration that would be matched by the Harper government, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Tuesday.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Kent said at a car dealership in Ottawa. “It is government policy to have every sector play its part in meeting our greenhouse gas emissions (targets) but there are significant benefits which will accrue to consumers.”

Kent and an automobile industry representative on hand for the announcement declined to get into specifics about the costs of the new standards which were previously introduced in the United States for vehicles, starting with the 2017 model year.

A spokesman for Kent said the detailed Canadian regulations for 2017 to 2025 model year cars would be published next week.

Mark Nantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, said the regulations would not be a cakewalk for his members and would require some heavy lifting to achieve.

But Bob Oliver, the chief executive officer of Pollution Probe, a Toronto-based environmental research group, said that existing fuel-economy standards on current models are not affecting the sales price or costing manufacturers as much as they anticipated.

“The capacity of auto sector to utilize computer-aided design, has really done a lot to accelerate the pace at which they can trial and proof a technology without a lot of destructive testing,” said Oliver, who jokingly mused about buying a new Cadillac because of its improved fuel economy. “That brings down their cost. They get it into market. They’re moving this stuff faster and deeper and at lower cost than what was predicted.”

Passenger vehicles and light duty trucks represent one of the largest sources of annual greenhouse gases in Canada at about 88 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases, according to Environment Canada’s most recent emissions statistics for 2010. The numbers suggest cars have become much more efficient over the past 20 years but that transportation emissions are increasing because of more cars and sport utility vehicles on the roads.

By comparison, the oilsands sector, considered to be the fastest growing source of heat-trapping gases in Canada, had annual emissions of about 48 million tonnes in 2010, according to Environment Canada.

Scientific evidence in peer-reviewed journals says that global heat-trapping emissions and land-use changes from human activity is warming the atmosphere, melting ice and changing weather patterns around the world.

Kent, who said last week he was convinced that climate change was a “real and present danger” that needed to be addressed, said the government was now “deeply into negotiations with the oil and gas sector,” while opening up discussions with other sectors.

The government also recently introduced regulations to reduce pollution from coal-fired electricity plants as part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s international commitment to reduce Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.

“I’d be misleading you if I said our 2020 targets will be easy to achieve,” Kent said. “But through internationally acknowledged measurement of where we are today, again, federal regulation, provincial actions, actions by businesses and consumers, we’re just over 50 per cent (toward Canada’s Copenhagen 2020 target) and I see that our American counterparts are acknowledging that they’re at about the same point.”

The most recent statistics from Environment Canada suggest that the country’s annual emissions are on pace to be about 20 per cent above Harper’s target in 2020.

Kent will be traveling to participate in international climate change negotiations next week in Doha, Qatar, but said he hopes to encourage other countries to take on firm commitments as part of a new global agreement to be finalized by 2015.

He said the government felt the previous legally-binding Kyoto Protocol was not fair because it locked some large developing countries into one category that he said was giving them an excuse not to participate in efforts to reduce pollution.

Environmental groups and opposition parties have said the Harper government has sabotaged the discussions by abandoning Canada’s international commitments to reduce pollution under Kyoto and announcing it would withdraw from the treaty.